KateLynSheil. ZacharyTreitz. Interview. Kate Lyn Sheil and Zachary Treitz (Men Go to Battle) talk Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the madding crowd. The Talkhouse. 07 May 2015.

1.      Sheil: Hi Zach.

2.      Treitz: Hi Kate. I thought we could structure this like a Q&A, and I would ask you questions since we’re in different places and saw it at two different times.

3.      Sheil: OK.

4.      Treitz: Where did you see the movie?

5.      Sheil: The Angelika. It was the earliest show, at 11:45. There were about five people in the audience, all of whom were older men.

6.      Treitz: Shouldn’t the crowd be mostly teenage girls?

7.      Sheil: Because of all the hot guys?

8.      Treitz: Because it seems like a movie that would play to the sentiments of teenage girls. Is that sexist?

9.      Sheil: I don’t know. I’m not going to tell you what is and is not sexist. It seems like people tend to think it’s a pretty feminist movie. Bathsheba doesn’t want to get married, she wants to run her own farm, etc. Those are fine ideas. Also, don’t underestimate teenage girls.

10.   Treitz: Well, there were four teenage girls sitting next to me in the theater. But two-thirds of the way through the movie, they walked out. Who knows why? It just seems to me it’s disguised as a female empowerment movie, but it’s made by two guys named Thomas. And the premise of the movie is that her life is completely structured around men.

11.   Sheil: No, her life isn’t structured around men, the story is structured around men’s fixation upon her.

12.   Treitz: Right, but the only thing that’s feminist is that she says she wants to be independent. The movie is about her long process of finding out she wants to be a housewife. It’s like the plot of Fifty Shades of Gray, or rather the whole trilogy, when we looked it up on Wikipedia.

13.   Sheil: That’s not true, though. She’s been in love with that guy for years. Also she offers him partnership in the farm.

14.   Treitz: But I don’t understand how that’s feminist.

15.   Sheil: I don’t know. This conversation is annoying me.

16.   Treitz: OK. Let me try to create some questions from my notes.

17.   Sheil: You took notes? Nerd.

18.   Treitz: I was afraid I would forget something. My first note is: “Far From the Madding Crowd”… except I wrote “Maddening” at first and crossed it out and put “Madding.” What’s a “madding crowd”?

19.   Sheil: I assume that a madding crowd refers to either the city, like London, or to other people in general. It seems like Bathsheba and Oak both demur from being surrounded by other people.

20.   Treitz: OK, so why do you think we were asked to write about this movie?

21.   Sheil: Because we made a period piece. And this begins in 1870, right?

22.   Treitz: Yes, so it’s different continents but English-speaking and a similar time period. 10 years apart. I just feel like our movie is so different that it is almost impossible to compare, because of the style and content and ethos of how we made our movie. You can tell that this has a production value that is very mainstream.

23.   Sheil: Yeah, it’s a large sweeping story.

24.   Treitz: And we always talked about how we wanted to avoid anything that was “sweeping” or bucolic or…

25.   Sheil: Sure.

26.   Treitz: I mean, I don’t really feel like I could critique the guy who made The Celebration. That movie is so incredibly intense and vitriolic and I can’t imagine how it was created. It’s amazing. But I do feel like I could critique the guy who made The Hunt. And this movie is hard for me to attach myself to.

27.   Sheil: I always find it difficult when books are translated to the screen and they try to fit everything in. Like in East of Eden, Kazan chooses a specific part of that book. Now, I’ve never read Far From the Madding Crowd so I can’t speak to how well it was interpreted but it seems like they chose to be pretty comprehensive.

28.   Treitz: The scope of the story is the same.

29.   Sheil: Right, they kept bits and pieces from every part of the book and it made it difficult for me to care about any one part very much.

30.   Treitz: Do you think that’s because the plot moves along quickly?

31.   Sheil: Yeah, like the older guy, Boldwood. Michael Sheen’s a wonderful actor. He falls in love with her and is devastated by her, and he does such an excellent job, but it’s like, why do you care about her? You haven’t spent any time with her.

32.   Treitz: Right. But that makes sense for the time, when people were forced into those kinds of relationships. That’s where people laughed in the audience, with these juxtapositions of how well people know each other versus what they’re asking each other to do.

33.   Sheil: The audience was laughing?

34.   Treitz: There were a lot of laughs. Like when Gabriel Oak first asks her to marry him.

35.   Sheil: Yeah, that moment is played for laughs. And I didn’t have any trouble connecting to that. That made total sense because he understood when she said no it was because they hardly knew each other.

36.   Treitz: But that becomes her relationship to all three suitors. The only people proposing to her don’t know her.

37.   Sheil: And I liked that about it.

38.   Treitz: Yes, but it seems like any time these three guys are in the same room together, it’s to advance the plot and you feel the hand of the author. That storytelling style feels like these characters exist inside a plot… that the characters don’t move the plot along, the plot moves the characters. Which you see in the first 10 minutes, when she goes from a poor farm hand with a smudge of dirt on her face to a rich heiress and landowner with the brightest red velvet… it doesn’t even make sense that she could find that outfit in time to drive to the estate.

39.   Sheil: So, she had one nice dress. No big deal. I mean, that’s what makes it characteristic of the time. Shifting fortunes were a huge part of Victorian literature.

40.   Treitz: And that’s what makes this kind of thing perfect for Hollywood.

41.   Sheil: It looks better than most Hollywood movies.

42.   Treitz: Right, but it’s put together with no more care and attention to detail than most prestige pictures. And the characters don’t feel very alive to me, more like they represent some class or type of person.

43.   Sheil: I think all of the actors do an excellent job and I think Carey Mulligan is a very good actor.

44.   Treitz: Yeah, everyone plays their part well. So, what is the difference between an adaptation like this and one that we liked a lot, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights? There are a lot of similarities in how time is passing. Similar ideas for shots, like nature details to convey the passage of time… close-ups of snails or whatever… but Andrea Arnold’s way of looking at it was a lot more interesting. This way just feels like a romantic comedy or dramedy. I guess the moment in Madding Crowd where I noticed my brain turning off was when he gave her a knife-sharpening lesson.

45.   Sheil: That was like the scene from Ghost. Or that scene in Tin Cup.

46.   Treitz: Yeah, that’s when I thought, “I’ve seen this movie before.” Which is fine, but…

47.   Sheil: It’s like so many stories of this kind. It’s a frustrated romantic relationship where, because of pride or social standing or whatever, the protagonists can’t communicate their feelings to one another.

48.   Treitz: Who do you think would like this movie?

49.   Sheil: People who like Nora Ephron movies, which is to say: me.

50.   Treitz: So you liked it?

51.   Sheil: Yes. Like I said, I found it a little bit impenetrable but I liked it.

52.   Treitz: I guess that’s all I needed to ask.

JerryStahl. Inside Miss Los Angeles. Another city. Writings from Los Angeles. City Lights Publishers. 2001.

I SOMETIMES wonder why every woman I’ve ever loved was completely insane. But then I think, that’s not right… not really. Not all of them. Just, you know, the ones in the last decade and a half. The ones—how else can I say this?—I’ve known since I hit Los Angeles.

Not to say that yours truly is any prize. We’re talking about an ex-junkie, retired crackhead, failed criminal, erstwhile porn scribe, former big money TV-writing fuckup, and offspring of a suicide by way of a professional electroshock victim … but enough bragging. L.A. is the place for guys like me. It’s the American Haven for Damaged Goods, the town you come to so you can make enough money to get the fuck out.

Grim but true. One week after sliming into Hollywood in the late seventies, I met a woman named Tammi who had two faces. Literally. Tammi’d hitchhiked to Glitzville “to get in the business,” and fallen in with a plastic surgeon who said “he knew people” who’d hire her if she looked like Farrah Fawcett-Majors.

“They wanted Farrahs, for the Asian market,” she explained, after two quadruple vodkas in an open-at-six-A.M. Hollywood bar called the Pungee Room. The Pungee was an undusted hideaway decorated with cartoons of has-beens, peripheral talents, and all-around show business mutants of every stripe. Joe Besser, William Bendix, Frank Sinatra Jr., even Rummy Bishop, Joey’s uncelebrated brother … they were all there, up on the wall, and they didn’t seem too happy about it.

In the barroom light, amazingly, Tammi did bear an alarming resemblance to young F. F. It’s just that, at the wrong angle, she didn’t look like Farrah at all. Sure, her mouth was Farrah’s, maybe even her eyes, but everything around and in between was some kind of wasted landscape, a topography of scarred, pitted flesh which, when made up just so, could actually resemble Farrah, but only Farrah after an accident, Farrah after she’d gone through a plate glass window, fallen from a terrace, nose-dived into a kidney-shaped pool from which all water had been drained. Hence, to my jaundiced peepers, she became the GWTF, the Girl With Two Faces, emblem of festive L.A. beauty from that moment on.

“It was Dr. Skippy,” Tammi confided, weeping softly into her Wolfschmidt.

“He had this cocaine thing … I mean, this was in ’74, everybody did. And I guess he had some kind of seizure, a miniconvulsion, right in the middle of my surgery. I remember, cause I was just under a local, and he kept lifting his mask off to get the straw up his nose. But”—and here a tear fell, ever-so-softly, onto the Forrest Tucker coaster—”but he was such a good little soldier, he went ahead and finished my face.”

Now came the brave sigh, that extra clutch on the sleeve of my wide-lapeled puce body shirt. For Tammi was, of course, an actress, too. “And’,’ she finished dramatically, “and he almost got it right …”

Needless to say, I fell in love up to my earlobes. By day, I labored in Larry Flyndand, down Hustler way. My job, for the most part, involved writing sight gags for vagina-shaped squash and rutabagas mailed in from the Dakotas — home, apparently, to a variety of genitally evocative vegetation. While Tammi, God love her, danced topless on tabletops at a strip joint near LAX. Her patrons were middle-management aerospace execs, family men who just wanted a little break from the meat-and-potatoes.

By night, once she’d slapped on her Maybelline, I could forget my troubles and pretend, for one or two gilded hours, that I was the Six Million Dollar Man. Beside my almost-Farrah, I could almost believe that our garage-sized tract in the Hollywood Flats—that region which lies, unglamorously, at the sun-sucked bottom of the chi-chi Hollywood Hills — was really just a mini-San Simeon. In the right light, at just the right angle, I could actually convince myself I’d hit the celeb-sex jackpot and nailed down the American dream. That I had, in other words, rolled into Hollywood and rolled onto a Charlie’s Angel.

The whole Tammi/Farrah deal was fantasy, of course. But then, this was Los Angeles, the town built on the horrifying reality that reality is so horrifying we need an industry to re-create it, in brighter hues, preferably with spin-off action figures to generate that all-important merchandising revenue.

Fast-forward a few years—we’re spleen-deep in the eighties now—and Sweet Tammi’s retired to Maui with cash from a settlement on yet another cosmetic casualty: faulty implants that left her right breast the size of a kumquat, the left one a sort of gelid duck pin. While yours truly, ever the rebel, found himself locked down on the famed Cedars Sinai dope ward. In detox I hooked up with a quivering young crystal meth aficionado named Tanya, daughter of a sixties sitcom baron and his Chilean au pair. The combo left her a green-eyed mocha showstopper with a burned-up trust fund and a Medusa’s head of auburn dreads. Her own touch were those B & O tracks running north from her dainty wrists to the crook of her banana-black arms.

Naturally, Tanya and I bonded hard during my twenty minutes of posthospital clean time. After which, for better or worse, my entree into the Real L.A., the Inner L.A.—or one particularly cheesy version of it— kicked in like a bang of adrenaline. A So-Cal archetype in her own right, little Tanya left her home in the Hills at sixteen to make her way in the world. Which, this being Hollywood and all, meant she ended up doing freelance dominatrix gigs at a studio called Madame D’s, a discreet and well-appointed hideaway catering to high-profile pain devotees.

Beyond the usual spankings and verbal abuse gigs—not to mention the odd electric cattle prod to the testicles, a house specialty—my gal’s forte was “The Roman Candle,” an arcane practice which involved slipping a match in some whoopee boy’s penis and lighting it. Thanks to the monstro powers of concentration unleashed by that IV crank, my sweetheart could slide a fire in a peehole faster than you could say “Hide the Hibachi!” This made her a real dream date for clients who wanted the worldly thrill of having their dicks spit flame as they were led around on a leash and bade to light up the mock-Liberace candelabras that lent the dungeon that obligatory Gothic ambiance. Until, that is, they shot their wad, put the match out, then toweled off and hopped in the Jag back to Brentwood to kiss the missus and tuck in the kids.

Here, oddly enough, is where yours truly got to breathe deep of the eau-de-power that keeps America’s Entertainment Center on track. By way of extra drug money, I’d help my lovemuffin with a little extracurricular work. And one other regulars, a hairy-backed producer of afterschool specials, paid five C-notes an hour for the heady thrill of being trussed up in a prom dress and hauled around Orange County in our toast-colored Nissan. Having me hunkered in the backseat made it, for Miss Irv, even more shameful.

Uh huh! No doubt looking to counter the pressure of shaping young minds as they munched their cookies and milk, our man longed to be driven around in drag, sweating till his bouffant slipped sideways, then shoved out at the nearest pod-mall while my vinyl-clad sweetheart called him names in front of horrified shoppers. “Why you little slut!” she’d scream at the plump and sweating show business professional. “You stupid cow! You filthy little pussy-girl!”

Somehow, between hanging out at Madame D’s and riding smacked-out shotgun in my baby’s dominatrix-mobile, I came to a strange conclusion regarding the burg I inhabited. It hit me, cruising with Miss Irv, that there exists some slick, subterranean pool of self-loathing and toxic desire from which springs L.A.’s true inspiration. The truth: Everything in this city exists as the opposite of its faux self. So that, despite the hype and blather, it’s not about the money, it’s not about fame, it’s not even about entertainment. Not even close. In this miniature constructed domain of reality called Hollywood, it’s about the twisted redemption of hollow visionaries looking to inform their lives with the substance that their very creations, the simulations of life called TV and movies, lack entirely. Hence the bevy of faux-Farrahs (or these days, faux-Julias), the mountains of action scripts written by Ivy Leaguers who’ve never even been bitch-slapped, the booming traffic in torture subsidized by buns-up Show Biz heavies for whom rank pain is the one real thing they can feel. It all makes sense.

Or maybe not. At least half a decade’s passed since most of the unwholesome madness described above. And I think, I suspect, that maybe it’s not the city. Maybe it’s not the women or the drugs. Maybe, call me a freak-magnet, it’s just me. I mean, I live here.

And I can’t seem to leave....

SusanBurke. Lyric. SureLove2008.

  I was going out of a party one night, Downtown
  When I got claustrophobic, too many people around
  So I went outside by myself, to take a few deep breath for my mentalhealth
  When out of nowhere, to my surprise
  I see a tall, young man with pale blue eyes
  He said, "Hey, mama, how you doing?"
  I said, "Pretty good. By the way, my name is Susan."
  Dirty blondehair, vintage sneeze, cowboyshirt, and natural stink
  We started talking into the night about Education, Philosophy, and [unclear]
  [unclear] dude I've met in a while, smart as a whip with a crooked tooth smile
  He kissed me, and my pants exploded
  I thought the Earth shake and my being fell pole (?)

  Suddenly, my friend came out of the party, and said,
  "Holy smoke, Susan, [unclear] he's a homelessguy,
  who sleeps in my hall. He saves all the poop, and showers at the mall."
  I said, "Double-u, tee, fuck, I thought he was a hipster."
  And he said, "I can play the hipster. The fashions are the trickster."
  Tell the difference. Take my advice. There's a little difference between the hipsters and the homelessguys.
  (Homeless. Yik, yik.) Eats bean from a can.
  (Hipster. Yik, yik.) Plays bass in a dangerbirdband.
  (Homeless. Yik, yik.) Will suck dick for crack
  (Hipster. Yik, yik.) Will suck a dick, but, well, for lifeexperience. It's notbecause they're homosexual, butbecause they aren't as closeminded. Different aspects of Sexuality, or afraid of what other people may think of them. Oh, and also, because they just did a shitload of coke.
  (Homeless. Yik, yik.) Saves his poop in a jar.
  (Hipster. Yik, yik.) Don't think it's ironic to drink TBR.
  (Homeless. Yik, yik.) Needs fiftycents for a new lung.
  (Hipster. Yik, yik.) Just bought a mini new coupe with his trustfund.

  Not that homelessLove is all that bad.
  It's just a little bumsy and strange for mom and dad.
  You see, Marty and I, we have a Love that's real,
  and I don't give a fuck if we beg for our meal.
  Now I'm a homeless, and I live in a park,
  I'm mugging hipsterwallets when I'm in the park.
  That's way tencity.
  I'm a smiley, living in tents.
  Yeah, I fuck your ass up.
  Excuse me, are those leftovers?
  God bless you.
  Poor fucking cunt.
  I love you.
  Seriously, I do. I love you.
  Okay. Start again.

RoseanneBarr. Twitter. 10 Feb 2015.

Propaganda succeeded. Example. JamesEllroy. Interview. SeanWoods. Rolling Stone Magazine. n. 1089. 15 Oct 2009.

On a recent New York morning, James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed “Demon Dog” of American Fiction, is in a good mood. “I feel like the weight of a lifetime has been lifted off me,” he says, sitting in a hotel room. “I’m 61, and I feel like a kid. All I’ve wanted, ever, was to write great fucking novels, have a couple of dogs and fuck women. What else is there? I mean, a good hamburger’s OK, but...”

Ellroy is a master of shtick. Over the course of a few minutes he can veer from over-the-top braggadocio (“I’m the Beethoven of crime Fiction”) to hipster jive (“can’t make the scene without caffeine”) to unapologetic perversion (“I’m a sex fiend!”) to biblical righteousness (I’m a Scottish minister’s son, and I believe in privation and a personal responsibility to God”). Best known for his modern noir classic L.A. Confidential, Ellroy has just released Blood’s a Rover, the last novel in his Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. The book completes his bleak and disturbing vision of the metastasised cancers at the heart of the midcentury American Empire – from the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam to J. Edgar Hoover and Howard Hughes – as seen through the interconnected schemes and criminal enterprises of rogue FBI agents, homicidal cops, mobsters and contract killers.

Ellroy’s obsession with the dark side of America can be traced to the well-documented trauma of his early years: his mother’s unsolved murder, his ne’er-do-well father who died not long after. A teenage voyeur who broke into women’s homes to steal their lingerie, Ellroy washed out of the Army and spent the next decade addicted to speed and booze, jailed for petty thefts and often homeless, living on the streets of L.A. After sobering up in 1977, he began earning a living as a golf caddie, got some books published, then emerged out of nowhere as the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, with a distinctive and brutal style that one critic described as “so hard-boiled it burns the pot.”

But as his fame grew, Ellroy’s personal life grew darker. Two marriages crumbled, and he threw himself deeper into his work – and wound up a suffering a mental breakdown in 2001, during the book tour for The Cold Six Thousand. “Flew too high, worked too hard,” he says. “Crazy suppressed shit came out and just blew up in my face.” Now, eight years later, he’s finishing up a memoir called The Hilliker Curse and enjoying the release of Blood’s a Rover, a giant historical noir that provides a romantic coda to his Underworld U.S.A. series. The protagonists, whom Ellroy calls “right-wing leg-breakers,” pursue redemption in the form of a left-wing agitator named Joan, making it like so many of his novels: three men obssessed with a single woman over the course of a great big bloody book.

1.       Your Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy covers 1958 to 1972, the years when you were most marginalised – homeless, addicted. Is that one of the reasons you wanted to write about that period?

2.       The trilogy derives entirely from my reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Libra in 1988. It’s told largely from the viewpoint of Lee Harvey Oswald, and DeLillo makes him the single greatest, most fully realised loner in American History. It was also the first time I had seen, in Literature, an unintelligent and malleable dipshi portrayed with such empathy and complexity. I realised, “Holy shit – this fucking book is so fucking good that now I can’t write about the Kennedy assassination.” But then I began to see that I could write a trilogy that would chart all the harbingers of JFK’s assassination and create a complete human infrastructure of big public events. After the L.A. Quarter, I didn’t want to write anything that could be categorised as a crime novel. I wanted to explore a theme that I call the “private nightmare of public policy.”

3.       What’s the private nightmare?

4.       The outline of American History from 1958 to ’63 is iconic and well-known: the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, the ascent of JFK, J. Edgar Hoover’s repressive shit, the Mob, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Then the decade of revolution in the youth Culture, the continuing nightmare in Vietnam, more bombs, more crazy CIA shit, political assassinations. We know that. That’s the public policy. But who’s out there taking names, doing the wiretapping, breaking legs, shaking people down, making a buck out of it – and suffering the convoluted Morality of it? Who’s coming to the point where they can’t do it anymore, and what makes them change? That’s the private nightmare. That’s Blood’s a Rover.

5.       This is a very dark trilogy. Did it fuck you up writing the books?

6.       It fucked me up completely. I inhabited the souls of these leg-breakers. I stayed with them Morally and spiritually. But Blood’s a Rover is about the necessity of revolution and change. This book goes somewhere entirely different from the first two.

7.       Deeper into the Moral consequences of violence and Corruption?

8.       Right. Blood’s a Rover is where the people who have been through the shit of 1958 to 1968 start talking about what it all means. I lived through that shit. I sensed it going on around me but (a) I was bombed until [19]77, and (b) I was an outlier in just a lot of ways. I was never a rock and roll guy; I was always a classical music guy. I was never a peacemaker; I was a fuck-you right-winger. I’ve got a weird view of American History that I think is viable and allows me to spread empathy around fairly evenly.

9.       Do you think it’s naïve to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone?

10.   It would be a triumph of spatial Logic and empirical thinking over imagination to believe that something else wasn’t going on. I look at the long-gunman theory and think, “It doesn’t make Moral, historical or metaphysical sense to me, so I’m just going to reject it.” And it’s a better fucking story my way. So I won’t argue about the lone gunman – I don’t give a shit. So what? Fuck you. Who’s your daddy Who’s got the better story to tell? Guess what, it’s me.

11.   One of your characters, a young right-winger named Don Crutchfield, is so willfully out of step with the times that he seems like a fictionalised version of you.

12.   That’s me – a big guy with a crew cut and straight-leg pants in the Summer of Love wondering why he can’t get laid. “Well, maybe if you quit jacking off and listen to rock & roll instead of Beethoven, you might be a little more likely.” In the book, Crutchfield doesn’t know what to do for Christmas. He’s never been laid, and he’s 23, and he’s lonely. He’s a peeper, and he’s got two options: go to midnight service in the Lutheran church, or go peep black women in South Central L.A. That’s me in a nutshell.

13.   Do you still have those right-wing tendencies?

14.   Right-wing tendencies? I do that to fuck with people. I thought Bush was a slimebag and the most disastrous American President in recent times. I voted for Obama. He’s a lot like Jack Kennedy – they both have big ears and and infectious smiles. But Obama is a deeper guy. Kennedy was an appetite guy. He wanted pussy, hamburgers, booze. Jack did a lot of dope. [A shortmemory caused by ignorance and inability to articulate himself.]

15.   So why do you still seem to identify with the right-wing goons you create?

16.   I’m a Christian, and my books are stories of redemption. I show you the karmic consequences of horrific deeds. More often than not, I want you to love my characters in the end, because they have transcended. They have found something bigger, deeper, Morally surer than themselves.

17.   You once wrote that Dashiell Hammett perfectly captured the american notion that a job can destroy a person. Is that what happens to your characters?

18.   The core of Hammett’s Art is the masculine figure in American Society – he is a job holder. He goes at his job with a ruthless determination and has an unwillingness to look beyond it. That’s who these guys of mine are. They are so fucking proficient, even as their lives are in precipitous decline. They’re eaten up, but they’re driven by their inbred American sense of responsibility. [Another ultranationalist nutjob.] There’s an undercurrent of tenderness that’s driving them as they go about doing their jobs so very ruthlessly.

19.   The way you portray J. Edgar Hoover’s wiretapping is very present-day, especially given what happened under Bush.

20.   I don’t know what I pick out of the zeitgesit. I’m not being disingenuous – I honestly don’t know. Let me tell you about my life. I’m 61. I exercise a lot, I don’t drink, I don’t use drugs, I don’t sleep very well. I’m very limited in my interests. I’ve got a big apartment, I’ve got a big sports car. I quit running around trying to get married. “Get married and impregnate women” hasn’t played out for me. My life has become a Matriarchy. I talk to Helen Knode, my ex-wife, my girlfriends and colleagues on the phone. I’ve never used a computer. I’m not shitting you – I’m cut off from the world.

21.   You life was such a disaster for so long. Did you ever think you wouldn’t make it?

22.   I was always looking to get off, and I had a very pronounced cold streak. But as fucked up as I was, I always had faith. And I loved to laugh. I could always go in a corner, scratch my balls, jack off, pull some dipshit stunt, like dining and dashing. I needed to make my way out in the world, because my dad was completely fucked up. I never felt pissed off about it. I never felt like, “Ooh, I don’t have a family.” I always wanted a family.

23.   That’s surprising. Given your books, it’s easy to believe that you see the world as an unrelentingly dark place.

24.   No, no, I’m not a misanthrope. I’m optimistic. Heck, I think human beings can evolve over time. I like people – in a distanced way [laughs]. Individuals have prominence over their psyches and can liberate themselves from horrible states of being as the world goes to shit around them. And I’ve chosen to do that.

25.   In your upcoming memoir, “The Hilliker Curse,” you express regret for the way you sold books by using your mother’s murder.

26.   I was young and callous. But now I realise my mother and I are not a murder story. We are a lover story. And the central story I have to tell is women. I knew that if I consciously applied my talent and my brain power to the persona of my mother, it would lead me to be more receptive to women in general.

27.   In the memoir you also write about your overpowering Lust for women. But on another level, you’re very puritanical.

28.   I want women. But it’s discerning, it’s tender. I don’t see Sex as being inherently squalid – I see the marking of Sexuality and the vulgarisation of Sex as being depraved. They’ve denuded and made common something holy and sacred. We need to reinvest in Sex, have less Sex, wait till the eighth date before you fuck and suck.

29.   In Blood’s a Rover, you seem obssessed with Joan, the left-wing jewish activist.

30.   I wrote this book for a woman I was in love with named Joan. It was the first time I ever did that. I’ve started following women involuntarily who look like Joan. You just walk 10 yards, and it’s not her.

31.   But you keep following?

32.   I eventually come to my senses. Definitely a fucking brain click.

33.   Do you still peep women?

34.   Yeah. Yeah, I do. I stay in on holidays. I live in a deco building on the edge of Hollywood. One holiday, I was peeping this big-ass redhead. She was flipping burgers, and her blouse would come up, and she would pull it down. She bent down way low, and I could see her bra strap. Then my buddy called and said, “What are you doing, Ellroy? Come on out here, we’re cooking.” I said, “I don’t want any food; I’m peeing. Leave me the fuck alone.”

35.   Do you feel guilty about that?

36.   No.

37.   Why not? Do see voyeurism as a form of appreciation?

38.   Yeah, you want to be saved. You’re genetically wired to salvation, and women are out beacons in the night.

39.   And that doesn’t strike you as weird?

40.   I am utterly cut out to be in dark rooms talking to women on the telephone and working. My buddy called recently and said, “Hey, we got an extra ticket for Fleetwood Mac.” What the fuck? I’d rather watch flies fuck in Alabama. I live in a vacuum so that I might go back and live more assiduously in pockets of American History. [Shit.]

41.   Is that the secret to your success?

42.   There are greater writers out there, and more gifted writers. What I am is a thinking machine. I see myself as emblematic of extreme drive and ambition and focus. It’s given me hyperacuity. I can write like a motherfucker, and man, do I rigorously think about shit and what it all means.

43.   What led to your mental breakdown?

44.   I went through a period of months and months where I was in love with a married woman who was never going to leave her husband. I’d just be surrounded by that big fucking cosmic nothingness. You could say it’s the issue of not being able to be with the woman you love. But more than anything else, it was just being alone in the cosmos and knowing that you’re going to die.

45.   Did you see it coming?

46.   It was the shit of a lifetime just oozing out of my palms. Physical stress, overwork, fissuring unconsciousness, boorishness, recklessness. Much too much mental energy expended for too many years. Raging panic attacks and horrible insomnia fits. I was just gone. I was way out of my emotions – shit roared through me at 1,000 rpms. I couldn’t hold anything back. And I couldn’t control anything through narrative. I was the worst time in my life.

47.   You ended up in an institution, right?

48.   Yeah, a bunch of them. Overnight at a nut ward in Monterey, overnight in the nut ward in Tucson. There was no rubber hose, but I was bombed, what can I tell you? Before I knew it, I was back at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel jacking off to pictures of Anne Sexton – in clothes! A dead poet! That’s how fucked up I am! [Laughs]

49.   Did you learn anything from losing your mind?

50.   I learned a lot from the crackup. I want to write great books and be good to people, and to shamelessly promote myself. But nothing’s worse than an ambitious person with no control. Someone who’ll hustle anybody, shabbily. No one wants to have anything to do with people like that.

51.   So it made you a better writer?

52.   I want to continue to write big-ass, shit-kicking, profound books. I’m arrogant, and I’m fearful. But I’m not as fearful as I used to be. The crackup took a lot of my fear away.

StellaStahl. Images. Her face.